For the first time in what must be 4 years I loaded up ZBrush and was amazed to find so many new features, especially around hard surface modelling.

When I first started with ZBrush way back in version 3.1 it was mostly good for organic modelling (if not the best on the market), but when it came to hard surface modelling it lacked and I found most of my modelling being done in Blender 3D, at least as far as hard surface went.

Now though, things have changed!
With Dynamesh, Clip and Slice Brushes, Masking improvements, Insert Multi Mesh and a shed load more features that I haven’t even tried yet…! Well this was just a pleasure to work with!

Anyway below is just a sketch\WIP so is not really meant to be anything specific, but was soooooo fun to make!

Anyone who knows me and my wife Katie well will also know that we are both insanely hard workers. Which I find a stupidly confusing thing to say as anyone who grew up with me (and hasn’t spent any time with me in the last 10 years) would probably say I was lying, at least about me anyway. It’s a sad truth that as a kid, young adult and partly a young man, I was a lazy little sod who should have had the words said to him: “Johnson, you’ll never amount to anything!”, but no one could be bothered.

These days though, it surprises me no end just how much of a U-turn I have made in my life. The truth is I try and work hard at everything I do. I actually take pride in what I do. So much so, that I sometimes struggle to let anything go. I guess it comes of a fear of going back to the good-for-nothing waster I used to be, and the desperate need not to fail for fear of where that would lead me.

If anything, 2014 proved to me that I not only went to the flipside of the coin, but tried to turn every coin I found over so our good Queen could see the sky. In other words, I went so far the other way, that I ended up achieving, yes, but the bite was so big that I struggled to chew.

We achieved a ton this year in our personal and work lives, and I am proud of how DustyGhost.com has transformed into the site you see today. But there are things missing, a shop, tutorials, videos and podcasts were all on the cards, but none of them happened. You might think with the obsessiveness described above I would have achieved all of this and more, but the issue comes from the fact I apply the same frantic logic to all areas of my life, and as a result I overload and the things I want to do, might sometimes not get done as they take second place to something else.

The honest truth is that I spent the end of 2014 in a haze of confusion from nervous exhaustion. None of that was from DG. This site is my escape from all of that, it was my fun zone, and I should have spent more time here, as that would mean I was letting some workload go. The issue is that I had so much going on, that DG got left on the shelf far too much.

In the meantime, Craig (Tompbeast) Thomson has been holding the fort well with his web comics, and thank God for that man as people just love Digger & Snuff, and his FILMFUNK strips. And Starhamster is now live and it looks amazing! Without him, DG would have ended up a ghost town.

So, Katie and I have both had to look at our lives and set some thick boundaries between the different areas of work and home life. Katie already went through this process earlier in the year, and was able to support me (again) while I recovered and sorted my own priorities out.

Don’t get me wrong, 2014 was a great year, we achieved loads! It just went far too fast, and all I need to do was put some pressure on the brake a bit.

So, 2015 is here soon, and I am making sure that this will be a fun and happy year for my family, my friends and a fun and happy year for DustyGhost.com. All deserve my attention and love, and all will get it.

Starting as I mean to go on, a friend of ours told us a sad story about her daughter who looks after a horse that is suddenly and tragically ill and the poor animal will not recover. She was relying on an artist to create a sketch of the horse for her daughter for Christmas, but the artist had to let her down at the last minute, meaning she would not get the picture for Christmas she was expecting! And so I took on the challenge and created this:
Granted this picture is not that clear (I forgot to scan it before sending it over) but I have been told that the little girl it was for loved the picture, and that brings me joy to know some good was done.

Lastly, I have to get in shape. Half the reason I get run-down and exhausted is that I am not looking after my body. I am overweight by about 1 and half, to 2 stone. For me that feels like loads, and I have been messing about far too much when it comes to my health and fitness. Again, because I have taken away from time I should be getting fit to do more work, I only have myself to blame. So, I need to set that boundary thick as I can.
I know what you’re thinking, isn’t this every man’s new year resolution? Well yes, and that’s because it’s a worthy goal, so it should be done!